How the run is laid out
Habits go down the left, dates go across the top with the month, day and the first letter of the weekday, and everything else is an empty box. Weekend columns are shaded so a run of missed Saturdays is visible at a glance rather than something you have to count out. Picking a calendar month snaps the start to the 1st and runs to the last day, so a February gives 28 columns and February 2028 gives 29. The other lengths start on whatever date you chose.
Column width is the limiting factor. A 31-day month across a landscape sheet leaves each column around 8 mm, which is fine for a tick and hopeless for writing a number in. If you want to record an amount rather than a yes or no — minutes, pages, glasses of water — run two weeks per sheet instead of a month.
The count row and the total column
The total column on the right is for the end-of-run tally per habit, and the "Done today" row along the bottom is for how many of the day's habits you got. Both are worth having for the same reason: they turn the grid into something with a number at the end. Twenty-two out of thirty-one is a result. A grid of ticks with no total is just a grid of ticks, and it is much easier to abandon.
A missed day is a missed day, not a reset
The one thing worth knowing about habit formation is that the popular 21-day figure has no support behind it. The often-cited study out of University College London followed people forming real habits and found the median time to something feeling automatic was around 66 days, with a range from about three weeks to well over eight months depending on the habit and the person. Drinking a glass of water with breakfast settles quickly. Going for a run does not.
The same work found that missing a single day did not measurably set the process back. What breaks habits is treating a gap as a failed attempt and starting over, or quietly stopping. Leave the empty box empty and fill in the next one. That is also the argument for printing a fresh sheet at the end of a run rather than one long grid: a new sheet does not carry the record of the days you missed on the old one.
Using it for something other than habits
The grid does not care what the rows say. Chore charts for a household, medication taken, practice sessions, watering a set of plants, checking equipment on a rotation — anything that is the same short list repeated daily fits. If the rows are people rather than tasks and the columns are class dates, what you want is the attendance sheet, which numbers the rows and pages at 30 names.
Questions people ask
What does the calendar month option do differently?
It ignores the day part of the start date and runs the 1st to the last day of that month, so the columns line up with how you already talk about the month. Every other length starts on the exact date you picked.
Can I track more than 12 habits?
The grid stops at 12 and there is a reason beyond the paper. Print a second sheet if you genuinely need more, but the usual failure is a long list where every row gets a few marks and none get finished.
Why are the columns so narrow on a monthly grid?
Thirty-one columns across a landscape sheet minus the habit names leaves about 8 mm each. That is enough for a tick or a diagonal, not for a number. Run two-week sheets if you need to write values.
The weekend shading did not print.
Browsers do not print background colours unless you enable background graphics in the print dialog. The borders and dates print either way, so the sheet is perfectly usable without it.